After years of losing in middle America, the Democratic Party is making a major overhaul to the elections that they think will put them on top.
The Democrats have talked for years about a shake-up to the presidential nomination process, and they’ve finally found one that will give them an even more liberal nominee.
Party leaders considered a proposal to stop kicking off the presidential primaries with the Iowa caucuses in the 2024 presidential primary, when they met this week for the Democratic National Committee’s Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C.
The party’s left-wing members have said for years that Iowa isn’t a good state for Democrats. It’s not diverse enough. It’s too conservative. It’s literally middle America.
Add in the fiasco with the 2020 Iowa caucuses, when a new phone app designed to register votes misfired and kept Democrats confused for days about who had won, and now the party is ready to act.
The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee entertained a proposal to abolish all primaries that take place before March… which would affect Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, at a minimum.
Under that proposal, states would have to reapply to hold an event that early…and the deck is stacked against Iowa.
“I think states like New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina can make a compelling argument as to how they fit into that picture,” DNC member Mo Elleithee told Politico. “I have a harder time seeing it with Iowa.”
Another member was even clearer: Letting American citizens choose a presidential candidate “turns off a new immigrant,” according to DNC member Luis Heredia. “They don’t understand what Iowa means in this process.”
The proposal that the DNC committee looked at said the DNC would choose states to open the presidential season based on three factors: States have to hold primaries, have a “diverse” electorate, and they’d have to “demonstrate general election competitiveness,” in the words of The Washington Post.
As usual, there’s more to politics than meets the eye, and this is no exception.
Look carefully at those three rules, because two are meant to exclude Iowa and the third explains the real reason this is going on.
Iowa doesn’t hold primaries; it chooses candidates through a public voting process known as caucuses. Iowa is a great and diverse as anywhere in America—with men and women, young and old, rich and poor—but Democrats only care about racial minorities when they say “diversity.”
But re-read that rule about “general election competitiveness”: That means it has to be a state where the Democrats do well enough that it’s at least a toss-up state. Iowa should qualify: Iowa voters backed the Democratic presidential candidate six out of seven times between 1992 and 2012.
But then, along came Donald Trump, who won the state by a whopping 9 percentage points in 2016 and 8 points in 2020. President Joe Biden isn’t polling well there—or anywhere else—and Vice President Kamala Harris is so unpopular she never even made it to the Iowa caucuses two years ago.
The “election competitiveness” gives up the game: The Democrats know they can’t win in Iowa, so they’re trying to punish the state’s voters.
Iowa is the definition of Midwestern: fields of corn, down-to-earth people, small communities. The state that would likely take its place as first would be Nevada, which is already angling to move up in the roster. Nevada—the home of casinos and brothels—haw already decided to replace its caucuses with a primary election in 2024, and it had a full-color, glossy brochure for DNC officials to look over at the meeting.
But Iowa Democrats say if the DNC drops the Hawkeye State from its traditional position in the presidential calendar, they won’t change a thing. “We’ll just go anyway,” former congressman Dave Nagle, who heads Iowa’s state Democratic Party, told Politico. “Being unsanctioned is not a big thing.”
The DNC ended up doing what politicians do best—talk for a long time and do nothing. But they say a change is gonna come, someday.
“We will be getting to that eventually, but not today,” said the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee co-chairman, James Roosevelt.
Once they get around to the resolution, rest assured they won’t get getting back to Iowa again any time soon. The measure is just another way Democrats tell Americans: Vote Republican, and you’re dead to me.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative who talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”